A retrospective and interpretive case study of how Northern Ireland policymakers narratively used evidence when crafting child poverty policy (2010-2017)

Part of the Northern Ireland (NI) political settlement of 1998 seemed to promise the dismantling of the structural drivers buttressing the previous thirty years of conflict. The new devolved Executive committed to a social policy based on social inclusion, cohesion and equality, including the eradication of child poverty by 2020. Nevertheless, despite a raft of apparently evidence-based policies and interventions to end child poverty, it remains an unresolved policy concern. This research aims to contribute to the understanding of why child poverty has proved so intractable to (NI) policy actors by drawing on a growing literature of how evidence is processed in complex or contested policy contexts. It considers the cognitive, linguistic, psychological or behavioural responses of policymakers displayed through their public narrative inclusion of evidence. A retrospective and qualitative case study overarches the pluralistic mixed method research approach including the quality assessment criteria of the researcher's own reflexivity within the inquiry process. A social construction ontology and post-positivist epistemology and axiology is followed within the meta-theory of a qualitative narrative policy framework. Official records of debates within the NI Assembly Chamber and committees in the period 2010-2017 have provided the basis for an interpretation of how those making policy navigated the relationship between knowledge, power and policy in their understanding and response to child poverty. Findings show that policymakers drew on various types, sources and suppliers of evidence. Statistical evidence was typically preferred when addressing solutions to child poverty instead of the nature of child poverty as a problem. Some used evidence of solutions recognised as successful elsewhere as 'symbolic reassurance' or 'coalition glue', attracting into a groupthink those with a similar policy stance rather than just a shared political affiliation. At critical points in policy development, the preference for statistical evidence appeared to monopolise decision-making and restricted consideration of other forms of knowledge, which might have upset the dominant 'groupthink'. It is concluded that rather than providing a basis for avoiding ineffective or trial and error policy development, evidence would appear to have primarily played a role in holding together an unstable coalition of political interests.